"Go!"
With this single order, Tom's body jerked forth, following the muscle memory ingrained so deeply into his brain he couldn't even form the thought of resisting them.
His body rushed ahead, mirroring the very same movements all the other cadets in the group performed right as the order reached their respective ears.
Jump out with the right leg, counter-swing the arm to compensate for the destabilizing shift of momentum, lean into the fall before while switching to a kick with the left.
This tiny element of the sum total of running was at the cadets' boot camp. But as the very opening of the running process, one couldn't underestimate its importance.
From the slight leap, dash, the cadets quickly slowed down and each settled in a pace they found comfortable, taking just enough time to factor in all those running beside them.
Then, bit by bit, everyone started to slow down a notch, switching from their optimal to most energy-efficient pace, one that they could maintain for an extended period of time.
Tom did all of this without a single thought making it past the blockade of his shock.
'Wha…'
Staring mindlessly at the huge, open scenery of the cadet's camp flashed before his eyes as he followed the crowd around the camp's perimeter.
With the open plain of the dueling area to the left and the shadowy innards of the Vin forest, everyone could focus on doing nothing but steadily following up the unsteady, overgrown path on the camp's edge.
Tom, as opposed to his colleagues who focused their all on maintaining their efficiently optimal pace, struggled to form a single thought.
'I'm not dead?'
This was such an obvious question…
Which made it all the more weird for the now young man to struggle with an answer.
'My heart should've…'
The very heart that Tom sacrifaced to vanquish the bastard who robbed his dear friends of their lives… It was now steadily beating in his chest, although at a slightly heavier rate than what he was long accustomed to.
'Oh right, my form back then wasn't all that great.' Tom looked up and cast a quick look around.
Even with his brain failling to produce a single constructive thought, he still observed his surroundings. He still registered all around him, from the outline of the major elements of the landscape to the finer details hardly anyone would ever pay an attention to.
'All predictions be damned against evidence.'
Tom repeated one of Roth's nuggets of wisdom that he came to greatly apprecieate.
That's why, irregardless of the shock, irregardless of what he could think was actually going on, he still continued to observe.
And no further than hundred steps from the race, Tom finally observed enough.
'This really is the mid-term race for the cadets.'
All the evidence around pointed straight to this event of Tom's past, one that he came to remember as a concert of nearly-missed opportunities.
A mid-term race that was to be one of the major contributors to the cadet's score that weighed in not only the acceptance score to the royal academy, but also on the depth of scholarship one could obtain.
It was more of an endurance march than an actual race… Designed to judge the cadets not by the time they take to complete the uncomfortably long stretch of a distance, but by the ergonomic side of their approach to this kind of physical exertion.
What the mastermind of this test wanted to check, was whether the cadets could naturally ration their energy to prepare for the oppresively long exercise, or if they would fall prey to their ambition, overexerting themselves in their greed for the precious score tokens.
The original intention behind this exam was however long lost by the time Tom ran the exercise, with him only learning the truth several years after the graduation when his party happened to chance upon the old, long-retired lieutenant who designed the exercise in the first place.
While all of Tom's colleagues ran for the sake of the score tokens, he couldn't care less about those.
'There's no denying it. This is the mid-term race,' he thought, calmly adjusting his pace just a tiny bit below his usual target of the time.
A knowledge… no, it was the sort of experience and awareness of the limits of his own body that Tom came to know along with the strain of a real battle, where one couldn't hold any spark of their strength back. Only in those kind of scenarios could one remove the inhibitors on their flesh, designed by the grand architect to stop one's own muscles from tearing themselves apart.
Only by knowing the greatest level of strain he could take, did Tom learn just what was his optimal rate of exhaustion otherwise.
'And that means,' Tom gulped his saliva down before speeding up his breathing pattern for a short bit to compensate.
'Rather than dying, I somehow returned back to the past, huh?'
Everything about the world around him could vouch for the validity of the claim. Every detail of the Vin forest, the dueling stands, the clean air of the pre-war era and even the quality of the uniforms all cadet wore.
All the details were so right on the point, it could not be an illusion. It could not be a projection of Tom's dying brain as the absence of his heart starved it out of oxygen.
That left the option of return as the only viable conclusion to what was supposed to be what all religions disputed - the fate of deceased after their death.
'Either way,' Tom tightened his fists as he deepened his breath by a tiny margin, taking a short break… and then slightly altering how he placed his feet on the ground.
All those small changes appeared insignificant at first, only to, as their numbers grew, to lessen the strain that running placed on Tom's flesh.
He was by no means tired. While Tom wasn't in his peak for either - in fact, he was far from it - he was still a cadet that originally managed to complete the whole race, finishing it within the top ten of the entire batch!
Right now, however, after taking a few steps-worth to consider the situation now that he decided what was actually going on, Tom opted… to slow his pace even further.
'This race…' he thought before turning his eyes to the left where, across the huge, open plain of the dueling stations, he could see the end-point of the whole race, so deceptively close it made the whole run seem a lot less of a problem that it was.
Finally settling down right at the perfect, energy-preservation pace for the current state of his body, Tom stabilized his breath before slowly silencing and then fully muting his brain.
'If I really came back… Then I might be able to stop them from dying. And for that sake…'
Tom looked up to the left again, at one, unremarkable dueling spot in particular.
'I don't mind losing most of the scholarship. I don't even mind facing that bastard again…'
A small fire erupted in each of Tom's eyes as he recalled the vicious, mocking face of the devil who robbed him of his friends.
'For as long as I will get him to teach me today!'